The cruise ship was departing from Venice, so we arrived there a the day before and stayed at a hotel in a subarb of the city.
it worked out pretty well i think, cuz if you stay in a super expensive hotel in the heart of venice you apparently have to drag your luggage from the car to the area where the hotel is...
cuz of course, cars don't go around in there.
it'd be interesting to take them on a gondola! :)
so, we checked in to the hotel and walked down the street to a restaurant for dinner.
my family asked for wine with their meal:
that's right. it's a pitcher of wine.
i thought it was pretty comical.
so one of the things that i quickly realized after arriving in italy was that i know pracitically NO italian words. basically i could say, 'yes', 'no' and 'bye'.
going along with my 'unpreparedness' for this trip, i hadn't considered the fact that i might need to learn the language in order to communicate!!
my sis and i thought it was pretty funny that our minds thought of french as soon as someone started speaking Italian.
it was like, 'oop, that's not English! i bet it's French!'
and all of a sudden, french words started pouring out of our mouths!
and then there was the whole saying 'gracias' instead of 'grazie'.
another oops.
i have to post this picture i took out of the hotel window.
it reminds me of Stranger Than Fiction, and i'm not sure why....
i need to watch that movie for a 5th time to figure out what scene i'm thinking of... :)
so the next morning, the day when we were going to board the ship, we decided to walk around Venice for a few hours before we boarded.
so we hopped on a bus that lead us straight into town.
it was a pretty interesting experience. my dad and i stood at the bus stop for like 30minutes trying to find out how people paid. ...as far as we saw, people boarded the bus from the front and back door and immediately sat down! no one handed the driver anything! we had bought tickets from a convenience store.
eventually we just figured that they don't actually NEED our tickets, they just need us to pay for them.
...or something...
so then we walked around the alleys for a couple hours.
as will soon become apparent, i took a LOT of pictures of random alleys.
here's one that lead to a bar ...or something:
i took a lot of pics of windows too:
as i've said before, i like venice. it's very picturesque.
we didn't go into any stores though, so that was kinda sucky...but oh well...
and that's about it.
until next time Venice....until next time.
